Equipment used to fill bottles or similar containers with liquids usually need to be cleaned from time to time. This is particularly important where the liquids are beverages for human consumption and some of these beverages such as fruit juices and dairy products, are particularly prone to contamination and/or degradation. Accordingly, it is generally accepted good practice to wash all the equipment that comes into contact with these beverages at regular intervals of about eight hours of continuous machine operation, once a shift, daily, etc.
Where large numbers of bottles or similar containers need to be filled with liquids, this can be done efficiently by filling the bottles under gravity from an overhead reservoir through a number of bottle filling valves, while the bottles are supported on pedestals underneath the valves. This technique is applied in most large scale bottle filling applications in machines called “rotary fillers” which have a number of circumferentially spaced pedestals, each underneath a corresponding valve that is fed from an overhead reservoir. The pedestals, valves and reservoir rotate together and each bottle is received on a pedestal, is lifted to open its valve, is filled, is lowered, and is removed from its pedestal, all within one rotation of the rotary filler.
Rotary fillers typically include a large number of bottle filling valves and each valve is typically complicated in structure, with the result that thorough cleaning of the valves is time consuming, reducing the productive availability of the equipment.
In order to reduce the time required for cleaning rotary fillers, each of the valves can be rinsed with water, detergents, solvents, and/or the like, in place, from within the overhead reservoir and/or from the discharge of the valve, towards the reservoir. If the valves are rinsed from the inside of the reservoir, a trough or similar collecting vessel can be placed underneath the valves, to collect the rinsing liquid.
Alternatively, a number of valves can be rinsed simultaneously by placing a manifold underneath the valves, lifting the manifold to open the valves, and rinsing the valves simultaneously from within the reservoir and/or rinsing them simultaneously from the manifold. Manifolds of this kind, used for cleaning bottle filling valves in place (referred to as “cleaning in place manifolds” or abbreviated to “cip manifolds”) are typically large and heavy, since they need to be structurally rigid enough not to flex when they are lifted to open the valves and they need to be large enough to allow a large stream of rinsing liquid to flow inside them. The space around rotary fillers is usually quite constrained due to ancillary equipment, but in order to avoid having to carry the cip manifolds far, they are typically kept close to the rotary fillers, where they are in the way and often cause nuisance, discomfort, or even injury. The cumbersome size, heavy weight, and complicated geometry of cip manifolds make it difficult to store and handle them and the difficulty is aggravated by the need to keep the path of the bottles in the rotary filler highly visible and accessible, to allow continuous visual monitoring of the filling operation and rapid corrective action, when required.
The object of the present invention is to provide a method and apparatus for automated cleaning of bottle filling equipment, particularly valves, in place, allowing a number of valves to be cleaned simultaneously by rinsing from the overhead tank and/or from a cip manifold, with minimal operator involvement and without significantly obstructing visibility or accessibility of the bottle filling process.